Darkness Visible

As I was saying, Black History Month has become a rather strange institution. While it’s meant to promote the contributions of black Americans to the arts and politics, it feels like an odd consolation prize, a little gloss on this country’s history of genocide.

Those themes—high and low culture, not to mention the business of culture and invisibility—make the artist Mark Bradford’s current show, “Nobody Jones,” such a powerful treatise on the ways in which the complications inherent in being black and American—let alone gay—barely register in contemporary culture’s pre-packaged world.

Born in 1961, in Los Angeles, California, Bradford spent his early years in a world of women: his mother was a hairdresser, and as a young teen-ager, Bradford became what he calls a “beauty operator.” In other words, he fried hair in South Central Los Angeles before embarking on several extended stays in Europe and eventually getting his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts.

From the first, Bradford used materials that were familiar to him—and, in a broader sense, to all the blacks in L.A., where he’d lived for most of his life. He put singed endpapers—the transparent tissue that hairdressers use to roll curls —in the paintings he showed in the groundbreaking 2001 Studio Museum Harlem group exhibition, “Freestyle,” curated by the museum’s director, Thelma Golden, and Christine Y. Kim.

In that show, Bradford was working on what can essentially be termed a smaller emotional scale, as though he were afraid to unleash the full breadth of his inquiry into time and place. In “Freestyle,” the work concentrated more on the grid structure. He tore at the painting’s surface to show us a no-man’s land of dark and bright streaks of color. In addition, his use of the endpapers seemed a statement about impermanence. Like those endpapers, his paintings could easily disappear.

Now, Bradford’s lyricism and the ghostly pallor of his canvases have grown bigger—not just in scale, but also in emotion. While his work is still tied to the mean streets of South Central, where his studio is currently located, Bradford has refined his interest in what it feels like to be disappeared by the culture at large. In his more recent work, Bradford pulls old posters and other markers of urban decay from the walls and applies paint to the surface of those wall pieces, camouflaging their commercial aspects. The paint is so thickly layered that it feels encaustic, acting as a series of veils over what the culture wants to sell blacks—better hair, bigger cars, more violent movies—and we buy for lack of ourselves.

Bradford’s works are like maps you can’t read. Who lives in this geography, where the artist creates memento mori like “James Brown is Dead”? In that work, the haunting, declarative sentence is carved into a collage of street posters. One could see that those posters were dusted by car exhaust, the random, phantom scrawls by anonymous street artists. By overlaying all of that with paint, Bradford became a kind of collaborationist. Like any number of the black passersby who contribute to his work, he takes his invisibility as a given.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.